Hot House, Cool Code
🌡️🏠🧊
This issue: it’s too hot. This issue is for those of us working from home in a heatwave. Tips on how to cool your house, your computer, and your code. And an innovative idea for using your laptop for whole-house cooling.
Less JavaScript = Cooler Computers
Plain old HTML and CSS continue to evolve, making JS redundant in a lot of cases. This brings a host of benefits, but focusing on heat: reducing JS means the browser doesn’t have to work as hard to render the page. Which means your computer will use fewer watts (probably).
Also, reducing library dependencies means fewer kB per website, so less energy is used on the network.
Not to mention there’s less chance of JS-fueled China Syndrome.
The low-JS approach lines up with the Web Sustainability Guidelines, even though there isn’t an explicit “use CSS instead of JS where possible” criterion (3.14 Use the most efficient solution for your service is close).
Common JS patterns that can be replaced with HTML or CSS and no/little JS: Aaron Grogg’s No/Lo JS. Aaron talks about no/loJS at Performance Observer.
How much time would this CSS-only content filter have saved me back when I was working on eCommerce sites?
Josh Comeau on CSS vs JS animation performance (“it’s complicated”).
Cool your house with cheap shade
During the last heatwave I was inspired to try some of The Guardian’s cooling tips (From yoghurt to luxury sails: how to shade your home from supercharged UK heatwaves). In short: add shade to the outside of the house, especially over windows. You might prevent 4+ degrees of heating in your home.
🪟Window blinds and curtains are of limited use, as the heat is already in the house.
Methods range in cost and difficulty from nailing up cardboard to installing automatic shutters. Tom Greenhill’s Heatwave Toolkit has a handy breakdown of the cost/benefits of different methods.
Since we rent (and I’m lazy) I tried some of the cheapest and least-destructive options: yogurt, tinfoil, and cardboard. I was going to do this as an experiment, shielding some rooms but not others, but this was vetoed by my sweltering family. So I just threw everything at the window to see what would stick - literally.
Tinfoil
🦺The foil goes on the OUTSIDE of the window. Otherwise they may break from heat.
Pretty great until it tries to flap off. Having clean edges helps prevent this.
A squeegee is a huge help here.
Try to get foil that is the same width as your windows.
£1.30 of foil covered a lot of windows. It’s reusable, sort of.
Measure and cut it properly - I didn’t, and it looked like crap.
Tinfoil will stay up on it’s own if you spray the window with a little water first, but…
…it left a nasty residue that wouldn’t shift, possibly because my myster had a residual water-vinegar mix. Fortunately the application of induction hob cleaner and elbow-grease solved the problem (thanks Reddit).
Taping the foil up might be a better option, if you use the right tape (see Cardboard, below).
…how much tinfoil would we need to pause global warming - by wrapping some mountains in foil and bouncing the IR back into space? (Similar idea, but space mirrors).
Yogurt
Yeah, yogurt. One tablespoon of yogurt was more than enough for one window and it went on easily with a wee paint roller.
Not nearly as effective as adding actual shade, but might save you a degree or two and it’s super-quick to do.
Washed off easily after 3 days.
Didn’t smell (probably - it was outside, my nose wasn’t).
Didn’t seem to attract insects.
Ashamed of your yogurty house? Tell people it’s Greenhouse Shading (same idea).
Apparently oat yogurt will work fine (not tested).
I’m sticking with the US spelling, “yoghurt” looks wrong
Cardboard
Cut it out, tape it up.
Cut it out neatly (I didn’t). Rough edges make it look sketchy AF, and increases the chances of it blowing away due to increased aerodynamic drag.
Don’t use the wrong kind of tape. I did, and it left a hard-to-shift residue on the window-frame.
Unfortunately we didn’t start a trend in our village, and now have a reputation.
Basically, do a better job than me and it will probably work out great.
That’s it for house-cooling tips for now, but expect more of this in future as I refine my methods for each heatwave.
Cooling your PC
Are you cooking yourself as you work? Standard internal CPU temperatures regularly idle between 60°C and 80°C, which results in hot air getting blasted out the back of your PC.
To see how this plays out in the home office, I hooked up my energy meter to my over-specced desktop PC to track its consumption under different workloads.
While multitasking it pulled a steady 110W (not good). That means it is radiating >300 BTU/hr of heat into the room. Add in human body heat (another 350 BTU/hr) and a well-insulated home office can heat up by a couple of degrees Celsius in an hour (although this will plateau because of physics, apparently you won’t get an additional 2 degrees every hour).
🍏 Mac Users: macOS an energy meter built in to Activity Monitor under the Energy tab.
What can you do:
Go laptop: If you have the option switch to a modern laptop. Laptops often pull closer to 10W to 15W - one tenth of the PC.
Turn off Zoom camera: This saved me 10w/h, even running in the background.
You are the heat: Your office has a high thermal load (you + your hardware), so heats up faster than the rest of the house. Use a fan to blow the hot air out of your workspace, or set up a clear cross-breeze.
Do all your gaming in winter: If your GPU gets involved, prepare to get cooked: trying Satisfactory on medium settings tripled my electricity use. Sidenote: thanks to Steam’s history view, I can see I’ve played 100hrs of Satisfactory at 300w/h, equal to 108m joules or burning a gallon of petrol.
Tweak your power settings for sleep, screen off.
Other observations:
Closing unused tabs and apps didn’t make much impact.
Opening Figma caused a 100w spike, but it returned to baseline after 20 seconds. Using Figma didn’t seem to use extra watts.
I didn’t do any testing with onboard AI, but I assume it’s power-hungry.
Use your laptop to cool your house
Links
hotcarbon.org (h/t Chris Adams)
HotCarbon aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in computer and networked systems to engage in a lively discussion around sustainability throughout the entire computing lifecycle, focusing on both the operational and embodied impact of computer systems.
Skews heavily academic, but intriguing stuff - “Dirty Bits in Low-Earth Orbit: The Carbon Footprint of Launching Computers”, for one.
Computing within limits (h/t Chris again, how does he keep up with all this)
Another academic conference with lots of intriguing titles: “Modest, artistic, and radical solutions to the environmental impact of image-generating machine learning”, which features an ethical imagegen running on a Raspberry PI. See also: AIxDesign.co.
…invites makers to create videos that stream at no more than 1.44 MB/minute…
Wonderful glitchcore stuff. A trailer.
Enough
It’s too hot to keep working on this newsletter. Stay frosty out there, ttfn.
